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11:59 AM, Monday December 20th 2021
Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1; let’s take a look at it.
Starting off, your superimposed lines look great. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. I’m glad to see so many page-width ones, though I’d have liked to see some arcing ones, too. The ghosted lines/planes are fairly confident, also. You’ve kept them smooth and straight, the whole way through, and not forgotten about the start/end points of the non-diagonal center lines – well done.
The table of ellipses exercise looks mostly good. There’s not a lot of variety, as far as their degrees are concerned, but what’s here is good. A few minor things. Try to hit the minimum of 2 rotations. See if you can lift, not flick, your pen off the page at the end of said rotations. And always be mindful of your pivot, especially if you see a pointy ellipse (because pointy ellipse = elbow/wrist). The ellipses in planes are nicely done – despite these more complicated frames, they maintain their prior smoothness/roundness. Finally, save for a bit of stiffness (which I’ll attribute to their size), the funnels look solid. Just be sure that the minor axis extends all the way through your ellipses; or, conversely, if there’s no more minor axis, simply don’t add another ellipse – it’ll be one aligned to nothing, and that’s not of much use to us.
The plotted perspective exercise looks clean.
The rough perspective exercise starts off strong, and improves considerably throughout the set. My only piece of advice to you here, really, would be to not stick to your original guesses. In other words, after you’ve plotted a point, check it, by ghosting it to the horizon, and altering it as needed, before committing to it.
The rotated boxes exercise looks good. It’s big, its boxes are snug, and properly rotating. The boxes themselves aren’t always correct, as per you being forced to prioritize their neighboring edges above all else, but that’s perfectly fine. As we progress through the box challenge, we’ll learn enough about their construction to be able to challenge certain rules; until then, this is more than satisfactory.
The organic perspective exercise looks great. As per their increase in size, and consistent, shallow foreshortening, your boxes flow as intended.
Next Steps:
Great job on this lesson. I’m happy to mark it as complete; move right on to the box challenge. GL!

Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.